In recent years, the price of electronic devices has decreased dramatically. In addition, the types of electronic devices that can be purchased have continued to increase. For example, laptop computers, tablets, smart phones, DVD players, large screen TVs, multi-carousel CD and DVD players, MP3 players, video game consoles and similar consumer electronic items have become more widely available while continuing to drop in price.
The decreasing prices and increasing types of electronic components have packed today's homes and businesses with modern conveniences. Typical homes and businesses now include more electronic devices than ever before. While these electronic devices may provide convenience and entertainment, many also require control. Moreover, these electronic devices consume electrical power and may consume other resources.
Currently, a lot of network load is created by pings generated to check the device status of many different network devices. Furthermore, some inaccurate results may be obtained because network devices can go into sleep mode and not respond to pings (but they are still active). Although it is possible to test services running on the network devices, each device could be running different services, which would need to be discovered and recorded. This is quite cumbersome, especially since new devices could not be monitored without identifying the running services or waking the device from sleep mode. As illustrated by this discussion, systems and methods for monitoring a network device may be beneficial.